Culture, Identity, and Community: From Slavery to the Present 127Holloway support ideas of cultural homogeneity. Holloway
asserts that because most North American slaves origi-
nated from West-Central Africa, the idea of a monolithic
Bantu cultural heritage and its links to the birth of Afri-
can American cultures would be quite applicable. Although
there are clearly fl aws in this sort of approach, the idea of
a monolithic Bantu culture or its signifi cant contribution
to African American culture fi nds support in the works of
a number of scholars. On the other end of the spectrum,
Mintz and Price likely exaggerate the amount of diversity
using African languages as a tool of measurement. Th e
truth lies between the two extremes, and ample evidence
for this conclusion can be found in recent scholarship.
Th e fourth school, known as the Diasporic approach,
combines the best elements of the Africanist and Creoliza-
tion schools. Championed principally by Atlantic African
historians, this school traces cultural continuities and dis-
continuities by tracing specifi c groups in their journeys
across the Atlantic through the establishment of African
American communities. By starting the historical analysis
in Africa, these scholars have attempted to track coherent
groups of people in order to see the many ways that they
either maintained their cultural identities or adopted new
ones. Th is has been the focus, for example, of the scholars
working on the Nigerian Hinterland Project and has been
part of the interpretive approaches of a number of recent
historians, including John Th ornton, Michael Gomez, and
Douglas Chambers among many others.
More than anything else, the Diasporic school focuses
specifi c attention on Atlantic African history as a means
of correcting many of the interpretive mistakes made by
advocates of the Africanist and Creolization schools. For
example, John Th ornton in Africa and Africans in the Mak-
ing of the Atlantic World demonstrates that researchers have
tended to overestimate the amount of cultural diversity in
Atlantic Africa because they ascribe ethnic identities to
every distinct language and regional dialectic. Th e problem
is that Atlantic Africans were multilingual, and certain lan-
guages and regional dialects were so related that they could
be mutually understood. Th ornton further concludes that
Atlantic Africa was not nearly as diverse as other scholars
have assumed and that, in fact, the region can be divided
into just three distinct cultural zones and seven subzones:
Upper Guinea, which included the Mande language fam-
ily and two variants of the West Atlantic language family;
Lower Guinea, which included two variants of the Kwa
language family; and the Angola zone, which included two
variants of the western Bantu language family. Because At-
lantic Africans were multilingual and were not as culturally
diverse as previously claimed, then it is entirely possible
that the cultures, identities, and communities they forged
in the Americas had a great deal of structure and order.
Another issue of importance in Th ornton’s assessment
is the claim that European traders, slave ship captains, and
plantation owners engaged in active and conscious eff orts
to ethnically randomize enslaved Africans. If practiced, this
measure could eff ectively undermine the ability of enslaved
Africans to foment rebellion on slave ships or plantations
in the Americas because they would not have an eff ective
means of communication. It would also hinder the creation
of a more unifi ed culture and identity among enslaved Af-
ricans. According to Th ornton, however, cultural random-
ization was not a signifi cant aspect of the slave trade. In
sociological terminology, he contends that the enslaved
Africans on a typical slave ship were groups as opposed
to crowds. In other words, they had some signifi cant links
to each other before they were brought onboard ships and
were not just randomly and haphazardly selected. Th is, in
addition to other points raised by Th ornton, has obvious
implications for the maintenance of particular Atlantic Af-
rican cultural practices and for the development of African
American identity.
Michael Gomez, in Exchanging Our Country Marks,
expands on Th ornton’s conclusions by showing that signifi -
cant African cultural enclaves developed in the Americas
as a result of a number of factors. One of these factors, he
argues, was the lack of cultural diversity in Atlantic Africa.
Whereas Th ornton contends that Atlantic Africa could be
divided into three culturally distinct zones, Gomez dem-
onstrates that there were six cultural zones in this region:
Senegambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, the Bight of
Benin, the Bight of Biafra, and West-Central Africa. In ad-
dition, Africans from certain regions shared cultural affi ni-
ties that facilitated the process of hybridization or mixing
between African groups. In discussing the ways in which
Africans borrowed from each other, Gomez, like others in
the Diasporic school, can demonstrate and even explain
cultural discontinuities. Unlike scholars in the Creoliza-
tion school, who mainly focus on the African adoption of
European culture, advocates of the Diasporic approach are
much more interested in explaining how African ethnic
groups borrowed from each other.